What aspects of the job have most effect on nurses?

The study reported here compared the influences of psychological constructs (job demands and scheduling control) and objective work characteristics (shiftwork, night‐work and hospital department type) on job satisfaction, organisational commitment, burnout and withdrawal intentions. Our hypothesis was that psychological constructs have a higher influence on work‐related attitudes than objective characteristics of work schedules. In addition to the main effects, we proposed an interactive hypothesis: poor attitudes would result from high demands and low control rather than from other combinations of both psychological variables. Using a sample of 153 hospital nurses in Israel, the hypotheses were generally supported. As night‐work, shiftwork and working in intensive care units are unavoidable characteristics of the modern medical environment, these findings are meaningful for improving the personal adjustment of hospital nurses.     

Comments on Jeff R. Crump's ‘The end of public housing as we know it: public housing policy,labor regulation and the US city’

Jeff Crump's discussion of housing policy in the United States is highly polemic but not very analytic or informative. Crump argues that federal housing policy is attempting to move people out of public housing and into the private housing market and the lowwage labor force. However, he fails to support his argument with credible evidence. My comments point out the most egregious of Crump's claims. I start with Crump's most extreme contentions that housing policy is coercing public housing residents into the low‐wage labor force. I then question his dismissive attitude toward the problems confronted by residents of distressed public housing and policies designed to help low‐income families move out of impoverished neighborhoods. I subsequently show how Crump exaggerates the extent to which federal housing policy is clearing central cities of subsidized low‐income housing. I conclude with a few words on the serious issues that a more informed critique of US housing policy could have raised. L'exposé de Jeff Crump sur la politique du logement aux Etats‐Unis relève principalement de la polémique, plus que de l'analyse ou de l'information. Selon lui, la politique fédérale tente de déplacer la population des logements sociaux vers les marchés de l'habitat privé et de la main‐d'?uvre à bas salaires. Toutefois, il n'apporte aucune preuve crédible à son propos. Ma réaction porte sur ses arguments les plus insignes, en commençant par ses allégations extrémistes selon lesquelles la politique du logement contraint les habitants des logements publics à des emplois peu rémunérés. Je remets ensuite en cause son dédain à l'égard des difficultés que rencontrent les résidents des logements sociaux insalubres, sans oublier les politiques prévues pour aider les familles à faibles revenus à quitter les quartiers pauvres. En conséquence, à mon avis, Crump exagère la mesure dans laquelle la politique fédérale élimine des centres‐villes les habitats à loyer modéré subventionnés. En quelques mots, ma conclusion porte sur les questions graves qu'aurait pu soulever un commentateur mieux documenté sur la politique du logement aux Etats‐Unis.     

Distinguishing external from internal scale effects: The case of public infrastructure

The recent applied production theory literature focusing on the economic performance of firms has increasingly recognized the importance of scale effects on costs and therefore efficiency. These scale effects may include short run returns due to fixity of privately demanded inputs (i.e., capital, long run internal returns to scale, and external factors affecting costs. Since these different types of scale effects can be thought of as shifts in and movements along cost curves, the different cost effects of such factors can be identified in a framework which explicitly takes them into account in the definition ofscale.In this article we formalize such a framework, and then use it to measure short run, long run (internal) and external scale effects from fixity of private capital, nonconstant returns to scale and public infrastructure. We then use these measures to identify the impacts of these different scale factors on productivity growth. The focus on public infrastructure as an important external scale factor is motivated by the current theoretical and policy interest in this issue; we show how a structural production theory model provides a rich basis for the analysis of the cost effects of infrastructure investment.     

The religious factor in private education

We quantify the religious factor in private education in the United States by calibrating a political economy model of school choice—among public, private-nonsectarian and subsidized religious schools—in which parents differ in their incomes and in their preferences for religious education. This shows strong latent demand for religious schooling, conditioned on current subsidized tuition levels in parochial schools, which is suppressed by the need to “pay twice” for private education. Applying the results of the calibration to gauge the effect of means-tested school voucher programs on religious and nonsectarian private enrollment, we find that when the amount of the voucher is relatively small, including subsidized religious schools in such programs is necessary for providing low-income families effective access to private education.     

A proposal for a more objective measure of de facto constitutional constraints

In this paper we propose two new indicators of de facto constitutional constraints. The indicators are based on the presence or the absence of easily observable political events. This makes the proposed measures relatively objective and easy to verify relative to the most widely used indicators of de jure and de facto constitutions. This paper describes the indicators and demonstrates their usefulness for research on economic development.     

Towards Assessing the Knowledge Gap in Medical Tourism

The medical tourism industry is a fast growing global niche market that generated $20 billion in income for destinations around the world. This study suggests and tests a mechanism to assess the medical tourism providers’ perceptions about the tourists’ perceived important product attributes when selecting a medical tourism destination. The results indicate that the various medical tourism providers groups do not vary in their perceptions regarding 24 important attributes of the medical tourism product and that they all agree that tourists perceive the medical variables to be more important than the tourism related variables. Using the Korean market for data collection, the study’s additional contribution is providing insights for Korean government agencies, operators of medical tourism hospitals, policymakers, and marketers.     

More on the role of switching costs in service markets: A research note

The present paper focuses on several important and under-researched issues related to switching costs (SC) as a defensive marketing tool in retaining customers with complaint handling. While most previous research analyzed the effects of SC on the behavioral intent of customers, our findings have focused on the actual behavior of bank customers; that is, staying with or leaving the bank to which they had complained previously. The findings show that, of the six potential facets of SC, only two significantly affect the actual behavior of complainants, one directly (i.e., Continuity Costs) and the other as a moderator (i.e., Learning Costs). Likewise, a customer's evaluation of the complaint handling affects behavior directly.